As they dry out, East Texans voice a gathering storm of complaints

Residents claim officials erred by keeping lake full

Flood levels dropped in Deweyville on Friday, but officials stress it is still unsafe to go into the area.
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Photo: Kim Brent

Deweyville's water levels are finally starting to drop, a week after historic flooding swamped the small Southeast Texas town.

As the community reels from the damage inflicted by the swollen Sabine River, some residents are criticizing the operator of a massive dam upstream from Deweyville for failing to lower water levels in advance of the impending storms.

"They allowed the lake to stay full knowing the rain was coming and then they got caught with their pants down," argued Artie Longron, a local businessman, hours before meeting with other local residents to consider a class-action lawsuit against the dam's operator, the Sabine River Authority of Texas.

The dam lies about 130 miles north of Orange, at the southern tip of the Toledo Bend Reservoir in the Sabine National Forest.

Though no deaths or serious injuries have been reported, the flooding displaced thousands, caused untold millions in damage, and forced Gov. Greg Abbott to issue a disaster declaration in 21 counties across the state.

Officials with the authority responded to those complaints, saying the reservoir was not designed to control flooding and that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the reality of its purpose and way it operates.

The Texas Department of Transportation said the eastbound and westbound lanes of Interstate 10 at the Texas-Louisiana border reopened Friday after being closed due to floodwaters.

By any measure, the rains that buffeted North Texas and parts of Louisiana were colossal.

When the clouds finally parted, storms had dropped as much as 27 inches in Monroe, La., and a foot or more in many parts of East Texas and elsewhere in Louisiana, according to National Weather Service data.

"That rainfall up there, it's gotta go somewhere, so it goes into the river system," said Paul Lewis, a meteorologist with the NWS's Houston/Galveston Office. "That flood wave travels down the river … so what it's done, it's traveled down the river, flooded out Shreveport, and then down and out at the southeast Texas border."

In the middle of the rainstorms, which dumped about 20 inches over Toledo Bend, the SRA opened nine of the dam's spillway gates, releasing about 208,000 cubic water feet per second, or about enough to fill seven Olympic swimming pools every three seconds.

Longron and others say the SRA had ample warning of the storms, and could have mitigated their impact if they had lowered water levels in the Toledo Bend Reservoir, which feeds into the authority's hydroelectric dam.

"The whole community feels the same way," said Longron. "This could have been avoided. If (the SRA) started releasing water 10 to 11 days before when the rain got there, we wouldn't have this wall of water coming down the river."

Unlike flood control reservoirs, the dam had been built to generate hydroelectric power, he said, meaning it had a much shallower catchment for floodwaters.

Still, that was little consolation for many local residents, who took to social media in the days after the flooding hit to vent about the way the dam operators handled the sudden influx of water.

"There is no defending this," one commenter wrote in a Facebook group for those displaced by the flood. "Someone up there dropped the ball big time and restitution needs to be awarded to those that lost it all."

The floods left the entire 1,200-person town of Deweyville under water, making it one of the worst-hit areas in the state.

On Thursday, Longron and other Deweyville residents met to discuss launching a class-action suit against the SRA, which they contend mismanaged the release of the water.

"I know there's a lot of upset people, but Toledo Bend was built for generational power, it wasn't built for flood control. … I feel sorry for all the people that God flooded, but as far as the details, I can't make a good comment right now until I do some more investigations," said John Banken, a commissioner in badly hit Orange County, when asked about residents' concerns.

Newton County commissioners could not be reached Friday night.

David Montagne, general manager of the Sabine River Authority of Texas, said lowering water in advance of the storm - which turned out to be unprecedented in size - wasn't a realistic option.

"This thing set on us for 48 hours. We would have had to have been 10 feet lower to catch this flood - like the drought of record (in 2011)," he said, rebutting claims the authority had dithered as the rains approached. "If we wanted to go there, without flooding people (downstream), it would have taken us quite a while. Months, not days," Montagne said.

He said SRA officials had operated the dam in accordance with strict federal guidelines and according to an agreement with residents both above and below the dam.

He also said the specifics of the reservoir's vast size, design and capacity meant pre-emptive water releases would have caused severe flooding in places like Deweyville, even if it had been released in the days or week before the storm hit.

"I wish it was easy as people think, like a bathtub, (that) all you gotta do is put a bucket and take a bucket out and catch what comes in," Montagne continued. "It's the fifth-largest service reservoir in the U.S., the largest in the South. It's got a huge drainage area and a 90 mile reach. ... It was just like the perfect storm, to catch that much rain in that short a time."